It's useless science Friday in my head - Welcome to the show.

[Strychnine]

Scientists Think They Can Finally Explain the Weirdness That Is the 'Alien Megastructure' Star

a team from the University of Illinois says we’ve been looking at the problem all wrong, and a different perspective could give us a pretty solid answer to KIC 8462852’s weirdness.

The researchers have been studying how the star's large and small dips in brightness relate to each other, and when they applied a number of mathematical models to the data, they came up with patterns that also appear in what's known as avalanche statistics.

Avalanche statistics have turned up in all kinds of natural phenomena, including solar flares, gamma-ray bursts, and neural activity in the brain, and while the maths is pretty complicated, in basic terms, it reveals patterns where small dips in the data occurring between the larger dips ultimately equate to even larger dips.

Avalanche statistics appear to be associated with things going through certain phase transitions - most commonly between solid, liquid, and gaseous states of matter, and in rare cases, plasma...

... "In other words, this could just be a star that's intensely active in some poorly understood way, giving off periodic massive outbursts that cause a dimming of the light. And the fact that stars like this are rare is what's been fooling us all along."

All 2.3 Million Species Are Mapped into a Single Circle of Life

The lines inside the circle represent all 2.3 million species that have been named. Biologists have genetic sequences for only about 5 percent of them, however; as more are finished, the relationships within and across groups of species may change. Experts estimate that up to 8.7 million species may inhabit the planet (about 15,000 are discovered every year). “We expect the circle to broaden,” says Karen Cranston, a computational evolutionary biologist at Duke University.

'Star in a Jar' Fusion Reactor Works and Promises Infinite Energy

In a study published in the latest edition of the journal Nature Communications, researchers confirmed that Germany's Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) fusion energy device is on track and working as planned. The space-age system, known as a stellerator, generated its first batch of hydrogen plasma when it was first fired up earlier this year. The new tests basically give scientists the green light to proceed to the next stage of the process.

Voyager 2 may have been hacked as it entered deep space

Later results revealed that a single digit in the binary code of command system on Voyager 2; ‘0’ was flipped to a ‘1’. Flipping of one bit of data suggest that some unknown party intentionally interfered with Voyager 2’s on-board computers.

Binary bit flipping is trick used by several hackers. Bit flipping can actually shut down a computer or even corrupt data. Investigators started to look for the source of possible hack and they first looked at Earth. But as the distance is involved so this makes it highly unlikely. As we all know that Voyager 2 is carrying a message by humanity into space. The message encoded abroad Voyager 2 is for intelligent civilizations it may encounter. So could bit flipping be a response to our message?

Some researchers say that bit flipping could be an obvious response by Aliens. After 3 weeks of this anomaly researcher were successful in restoring the communication system. But who or what caused the anomaly is still a question. The exact cause of bit flipping still stays unknown.

[Baron Von Crowder]

No red text? 1/10, would not read.

[Strychnine]

No red text? 1/10, would not read.

I'm still tempted to highlight everything I type in red...

Instead I'll just post a piece and leave the rest at the link



Last month:




It's official: NASA's peer-reviewed EM Drive paper has finally been published

After months of speculation and leaked documents, NASA's long-awaited EM Drive paper has finally been peer-reviewed and published. And it shows that the 'impossible' propulsion system really does appear to work.

The NASA Eagleworks Laboratory team even put forward a hypothesis for how the EM Drive could produce thrust – something that seems impossible according to our current understanding of the laws of physics.

In case you've missed the hype, the EM Drive, or Electromagnetic Drive, is a propulsion system first proposed by British inventor Roger Shawyer back in 1999. Instead of using heavy, inefficient rocket fuel, it bounces microwaves back and forth inside a cone-shaped metal cavity to generate thrust. According to Shawyer's calculations, the EM Drive could be so efficient that it could power us to Mars in just 70 days.

But, there's a not-small problem with the system. It defies Newton's third law, which states that everything must have an equal and opposite reaction. According to the law, for a system to produce thrust, it has to push something out the other way. The EM Drive doesn't do this.

Yet in test after test it continues to work. Last year, NASA's Eagleworks Laboratory team got their hands on an EM Drive to try to figure out once and for all what was going on. And now we finally have those results.

This this something the Chinese claim to have been working on since 2013:
EmDrive: China's radical new space drive

[Scott Mc]

Now that is an x mas present! Thank you sir!

[Forever_frost]

How long until we have a ship running with one of those?

[cobrajet69]

How long until we have a ship running with one of those?

SVO already built one for his 3rd grade science class but found out the microwave wasn't invented yet, so he invented it. He then found that it didn't achieve warp drive but also found that warp drive wasn't invented yet so he invented it.
Got bored and dropped the project so his minions could finish it and take credit. They [minions] became what we now know as NASA.


David

[Strychnine]

Now that is an x mas present! Thank you sir!

Happy New Year.


For those new year resolutions: Self-Control Is Just Empathy With Your Future Self

Press your right index finger to the top of your right ear, where it meets your head. Now move up an inch and back an inch. You’re now pointing at your right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ). This area has long been linked to empathy and selflessness. But Soutschek, by using magnetic fields to briefly shut down the rTPJ, has shown that it’s also involved in self-control.

Which makes perfect sense. Empathy depends on your ability to overcome your own perspective, appreciate someone else’s, and step into their shoes. Self-control is essentially the same skill, except that those other shoes belong to your future self—a removed and hypothetical entity who might as well be a different person. So think of self-control as a kind of temporal selflessness. It’s Present You taking a hit to help out Future You.

Stunning Videos of Evolution in Action

What you’re seeing in the movie is a vivid depiction of a very real problem. Disease-causing bacteria and other microbes are increasingly evolving to resist our drugs; by 2050, these impervious infections could potentially kill ten million people a year. The problem of drug-resistant infections is terrifying but also abstract; by their nature, microbes are invisible to the naked eye, and the process by which they defy our drugs is even harder to visualise.

But now you can: just watch that video again. You’re seeing evolution in action. You’re watching living things facing down new challenges, dying, competing, thriving, invading, and adapting—all in a two-minute movie.

A Shocking Find In a Neanderthal Cave In France

Their date? 176,500 years ago, give or take a few millennia.

“When I announced the age to Jacques, he asked me to repeat it because it was so incredible,” says Verheyden. Outside Bruniquel Cave, the earliest, unambiguous human constructions are just 20,000 years old. Most of these are ruins—collapsed collections of mammoth bones and deer antlers. By comparison, the Bruniquel stalagmite rings are well-preserved and far more ancient.

And if Rouzaud’s work made it unlikely that modern humans built the rings, Verheyden’s study grinds that possibility into the dust. Neanderthals must have been responsible. There simply wasn’t any other hominin in that region at that time.

The Plan to Avert Our Post-Antibiotic Apocalypse

The report’s language is sober but its numbers are apocalyptic. If antibiotics continue to lose their sting, resistant infections will sap $100 trillion from the world economy between now and 2050, equivalent to $10,000 for every person alive today. Ten million people will die every year, roughly one every three seconds, and more than currently die from cancer. These are conservative estimates: They don’t account for procedures that are only safe or possible because of antibiotics, like hip and joint replacements, gut surgeries, C-sections, cancer chemotherapy, and organ transplants.

Caltech Researchers Find Evidence of a Real Ninth Planet

In January, two astronomers reported new evidence of a massive, shadowy Planet Nine tracing the outer limits of the solar system. It has a mass 10 times that of the Earth, and its orbit takes it 20 times farther from the sun, on average, than Neptune. The catch? Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of Caltech haven’t seen it—they inferred its existence from the behavior of smaller objects nearby that appear to be subject to its gravitational pull. Now the search is on. Brown predicts astronomers will find it by 2018.